Character Death

Contents

Dying is a part of State of Decay. Players may get their characters killed by accident because of carelessness or oversight. Experienced players may have their characters killed on purpose to cut down Food and Ammo consumption, to get rid of an annoying overbearing alcoholic, etc. This article deals with how player-controlled characters can die and the effects of death on remaining survivors.

Death in State of Decay is permanent. There is no way to "bring back" a dead character (without using cheats/mods or interfering with save files). In the DLC Breakdown, however, characters killed in a previous level can be recruited again in subsequent levels.

When a character loses all health, they enter the "struggling" state. The screen turns near black and white, the character sits down, covers his/her head and the prompt "Press [...] to get up" is displayed on the screen.

At this point, each attack from surrounding zombies directly reduces maximum health. When the character's max health depletes, he/she gets torn in half by two zombies. Occasionally, when the zombies cannot do the "tear in half" animation (due to them being obstructed by the environment or some other reason), the character simply lies dead or get bitten in the neck.

Falling from a sufficient height (such as a cell-tower survey point) will make the player-controlled character enter the "death" state animation, but if there are no zombies nearby the screen will just fade to black and the player will be able to continue playing the same character where they had fallen.

It is not possible to instantly kill a full-health character with explosives, no matter how powerful. However, this does reduce the character's max health. When the character's max health is at a minimum, a sufficiently powerful explosion will kill the character.

If the dead character has at least one item in the inventory, a Rucksack will be spawned. Retrieving this rucksack increases morale by a small amount (5) and add the items of the deceased survivor to the Supply Locker.

When an AI-controlled survivor gets killed by zombies, that survivor will always die in a "Blaze of Glory" manner, regardless of whether they have a grenade in the inventory or not. After the Update_12/02/2014, this no longer applies. Survivors without thrown explosives in the inventory simply get ripped apart and die.

Attempting to access the journal when dying prompts one of the following messages.

"This isn't the time for a little casual reading."

"The pages are too blood-soak to read."

"Some people are scared of books. Zombies, not so much."

Attempting to access the journal after dying will display

"You can't reach your journal right now."

If the player attempts to use their map or radio they will see this message.